Steve Jobs was a great American entrepreneur who also thought that drinking more fruit juice would cure his pancreatic cancer holistically; cancer that was almost certainly caused by decades of a fruit and nut diet that pushed his pancreas past the breaking point.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. It's interesting how many great innovators stand on both sides.

Baron Harkonnen:Steve Jobs was a great American entrepreneur who also thought that drinking more fruit juice would cure his pancreatic cancer holistically; cancer that was almost certainly caused by decades of a fruit and nut diet that pushed his pancreas past the breaking point.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. It's interesting how many great innovators stand on both sides.

Reading Walter Isaacson's bio of Steve Jobs makes it sound like they succeeded as much despite him as because of him. Take the iPhone 4, for example: Jobs insisted on having a metal band around its edges, which the engineers (rightfully) told him was a bad idea, because it would block radio signals. He only budged enough to allow some openings to be put in that metal band, which then led to a problem where you could easily block that opening with your finger as you hold it and lose signal strength, sometimes enough to drop calls. and then when that was questioned later, he gave his infamous "You're holding it wrong" response, which would have gotten any frontline iPhone support agent fired. And there's much more like that, like the way his design demands made the original Macintosh far more expensive and underpowered (even by the standards of the day) than it should have been.

It's kind of interesting to think about, with all the "Apple is doooooooooooooooooooooomed without Steve Jobs!" trolls that seem to infest the tech press these days.

Patent trolls need to be reigned in. It's like domain parking. No website, no valid claim to the domain. No product, no valid claim to the patent. these companies spring up that buy these patents up and sit on them, then sue other companies for settlements.

/Trademarks are a blunt cudgel, overly used to crush competition//Copyright has become perpetual, spelling the end of common culture

Physical property does not expire; why should intellectual property? If I inherit a house, I can charge rent on it indefinitely, as can my heirs. It does not become public property 50 (or however many years) after the original builder dies.

Capitalism. Don't you love it?

Physical property and "intellectual property" are two entirely different things. For example, if I own a house, I can't sue you because your house looks too similar to mine, or even if you deliberately set out to copy my house.

And copyright isn't capitalism. Capitalism involves the trading of money for goods and services, with values fluctuating based upon the scarcity of the good or service. Copyright is the creation of a monopoly on a non-scarce good by government fiat.

Baron Harkonnen : Steve Jobs was a great American entrepreneur who also thought that drinking more fruit juice would cure his pancreatic cancer holistically; cancer that was almost certainly caused by decades of a fruit and nut diet that pushed his pancreas past the breaking point.

You left out the part where he gamed the US organ transplant system to steal a liver from hundreds of other (non-rich) people actually interested in getting real medical care.

Steve Jobs may well have embodied the American Dream, but in a way that makes that not even remotely a compliment.

Baron Harkonnen:There's a fine line between genius and insanity. It's interesting how many great innovators stand on both sides.

Based on Walter Isaacson's bio, Jobs was nothing more than a combination of a sociopath, good salesman and motivator. Also not very bright when his health or family was concerned. His cancer was a rare form of treatable pancreatic cancer but he chose to wait for a year and see if eating large quantities of fruit (which probably caused his condition in the first place) and "alternative medicine" will cure him. That decision almost certainly killed him.

`Marconi' invented the radio - I've heard that all of my life. What most don't know is that his idea was based on 17 patents by Tesla. Most of todays technology is based on this guys inventions, patents and ideas.

The American patent system is based on what Gar Alperovitz calls "the hero inventor" ideology, the belief that one man or woman working diligently and independently on a project drives innovation by upending the status quo.

I don't think it's that at all. I think the problem is a deliberately overworked and underfunded Patent Office that doesn't have the time to read patent applications that are deliberately written in a confusing, complicated way and so they end up granting overly broad patents. The intent is to stifle competition but every once in a while, one of these overly-broad patents comes back to bite a big company in the ass.